Love Enjoyed in Freedom:
A History of the Free Love Movement
And so we turn now to the second book under consideration in this review - Spurlock's history of the early stages of the free love movement in America, Free Love: Marriage and Middle-Class Radicalism in America, 1825-1860.
Spurlock characterizes this movement in the following way:
By the middle of the 1850s a network stretched across the northern states composed
of many hard-working men and women who ... demanded the 'disintegration' of American society, the repudiation of Christian orthodoxy, and the abolition of marriage. These were the free lovers.
It was the free lovers, according to Spurlock, who helped to define a very long tradition of radicalism in the United States that included not only antislavery activists, but also feminists. During the period in question,
no-one could be a free lover ... without being a radical, and therefore against the
slavery of the black man and the married woman. Free love, to a large extent, defined
what radicalism meant to the ante-bellum bourgeoisie. I have used the term middle-class
radicalism to designate this extension of middle-class values into a criticism of
American society.
Free love, however, did not last as a movement. Spurlock attributes this primarily to two
causes: 1) the fact that many of its objectives (sexual freedom, the philosophical and
cultural separation of sex and marriage, the use of birth control, divorce laws enabling the dissolution of marriages, and so on) were not only eventually adopted as goals of mainstream society, they were goals that had been more or less successfully accomplished by the end of the 19th century; and 2) the fact that the free love movement was primarily a middle class phenomenon during a time in which radicalism was increasingly turning to the concerns of the working class.
It was, however, a movement whose issues were to resurface, nearly a century later, in
the postindustrial age:
Following the Reconstruction, radicalism became largely a matter of
working-class organization and left behind the cultural concerns that had been central
to the free love ideology. These concerns, however, persisted through the century and
have become important in our postindustrial world when marriage and family, along with
the middle class, seem to be in crisis.
A slightly different way of putting this would be to say that the free love
movement was co-opted. The culture permitted an increase in sexual freedoms
in lieu of satisfying the more radical demands that were being made
by the free lovers, who insisted on a thoroughgoing overhaul of cultural
values and practices regarding interpersonal relationships - marriage as
domination, gender equity in relationships, non-coercive relationship, etc.
In combination with the fact that some radicals believed that the need to
address economic issues pre-empted the necessity of fighting domination in
the sphere of private and public relationship, this could very well account
for the decline of interest in the free love movement in the late nineteenth
century.
In this way one could also begin to explain why the same issues continue
to re-surface today - as illustrated by Gidden's book: these issues were never
satisfactorily resolved. We are only now, more than a hundred years after the
decline of the free love movement, coming to the realization that the insights
underlying and inspiring the original movement were never permitted to
come to full fruition in society at large - either at that time, or since.
'Free Love' as a Movement
The free love movement took place against a backdrop created in part by the
institution of marriage. So it is therefore only natural for Spurlock, interested in
placing the movement in its historical context, to seek to describe changes that had taken
place in that institution prior to the beginning of the free love movement in the
early 19th century:
The economic changes that fostered the new middle class also encouraged
new family patterns. The Puritan ideal of marriage as the mainstay of
a consensual society yielded to the new middle-class reality in which
marriage served as an enclave where producers were prepared for the
active life of commerce or nursed back to health from the wounds
of competitive society. ... The married couple no longer formed a partnership;
rather, each performed duties within his or her separate sphere.
One of the earliest attacks on the ideal of middle-class marriage thus
comes, according to Spurlock, from Robert Owens. It was he who, "rather
than understanding marriage as the consequence of an unwavering and purely
private experience of love, ... viewed [it] as a social product serving the ends of a
class-bound society". Owens' appreciation for, and faith in, cooperative
communities grew out of his experience in managing cotton mills during the
1790s, Spurlock tells us.
The remedy, as Owens saw it, was the destruction of 'the threefold
causes which deprive man of mental liberty': private property, irrational religion, and a
marriage based on private property.
Although closely identified with Robert Owen through the late 1820s,
Robert Dale Owen (born in 1801) moved away from communitarian reform
after his father's return to Europe. From envisioning a society completely
remade, so that communal child-rearing could take the risk of marriage,
Robert Dale Owen turned to support for divorce as the most important
reform of marriage. He agreed with his father that love could not be
guaranteed but believed that the availability of divorce would make
marriage more nearly a union of two freely consenting individuals
and guarantee the affections of those involved.
Whereas Owenism's appeal in America was adversely affected by the
growth of individualism, another movement that brought into question
important middle-class institutions - Transcendalism - benefited
from the rise of 'the individual'. Such notables as Emerson, Thoreau, Coleridge,
Wordsworth, Alcott and Fuller - all recognized as eminent transcendentalists -
actively critiqued marriage. Their criticism of the institution rested primarily
on 'spiritual' grounds, however. We are told that Margaret Fuller's suspicions
regarding the institution, for example, 'resulted from her recognition of the
contradiction between the bourgeois woman's sphere and the individual's search for
transcendence.'
The social sphere held little attraction for the transcendentalists. They
indeed argued that if individualism was the value to embrace, then 'the associative
life is a false effort.' And although transcendentalism attempted
to repudiate Owenite socialism, they nevertheless 'helped to prepare for later
reform movements that would seek to reduce government, commerce,
and marriage to freely contracted relationships among individual
sovereigns.'
The ideas of Charles Fourier, who had also received attention
in the United States as early as 1838, were similarly called into
question by the transcendentalists. What Fourier had presumably ignored,
according to transcendentalist critics 'were those qualities of humanity that
constitute individuality'.
Others free lovers, however, embraced Fourierism, believing that it
offered a 'reconciliation of individual and communal values'.
In these early 19th century debates amongst radicals we see two
perspectives on the relationship between the individual and society
emerging. In one view individual autonomy and socially cohesive
forms of organization are believed to be mutually exclusive options.
In the other, they are not. Not until relatively recently,
however, has explicit attention been given to the former view
as the manifestation of a particularly dangerous socio-political
fallacy - the 'autonomy versus community' fallacy [[1]].
We can now, in retrospect, see the early 1800s as a time
in which this realization was struggling to emerge in left-wing
politics.
Although conceptual clarity on this issue had not been reached at that time,
many individuals in the early free love movement nevertheless consciously
strove to establish interpersonal relationships of a sort that reconciled
their own individual autonomy with an equally profound need for intimate social
bonding. And some understood precisely what they were doing - despite the fact
that they often lacked a good way of keeping in theoretical focus the fallacy
that so frequently threatened to undermine their efforts by rendering autonomy
and community irreconcilable 'opposites'.
Noyes, who had gathered around himself a community of likeminded
people in Putney Vermont in 1838, was one of the individuals
who made a gallant effort to remain on the razor's edge between
individual sovereignty and group solidarity. He described the developments
that took place in the Putney community between 1840 and 1847 as the
working out - in theory and practice - of the principles of 'assocation'.
'Step by step,' he said, 'the school advanced from community of faith,
to community of property, community of households, community of affections'.
An offshoot of this experiment, the Oneidan community in upstate New York,
was in fact the first to use the term 'free love' to describe their
system of complex marriage.
Like these alternative communities, based on notions of 'individual
perfection', certain forms of spiritualism embraced a form of
individualism that espoused a kind of intense individual experience
that has always been the hallmark of revivalism. Individuals in these
traditions sought a kind of wisdom that is founded on intuitive forms of
knowledge that transcends known catergories. But they also - and this is
what is particularly remarkable about them - stressed 'harmony among
people and between the spiritual and the carnal.'
For example:
Combining study of Swedenborg and mesmerism with their interest in
social reform, the circle [of people gathering around John O. Wattles
in Cincinnati in 1846] hoped to isolate the 'First Principles'
that would guarantee personal and social harmony.'
Similarly, Andrew Jackson Davis spoke of 'innate affinities which draw
soul to soul', sometimes calling these 'elective affinities' - a
term that was presumably meant to emphasize the fact that
the love that was thereby fostered was freely given love.
By the early 1850s, Spurlock notes, it was common for spiritualism to be
linked with free love.
The free love movement was the epitome of middle-class radicalism,
accepting both the worldly and heavenly reorganization first discussed
by the harmonalists. If free lovers were more extreme, it was in their
belief in individuality and their extension of it into marriage. Religious
doubt and the rejection of orthodoxy would be as typical of free lovers
as of harmonalists. For both, genuine spirituality meant purer relations
between the sexes.
Given the mention made of 'pure relations' in the above paragraph -
and many others like it in the free love literature - Giddens' more recent
parallel use of the term can be recognized as no mistake, no mere coincidence.
Purity, in this context, implies an absence of those features that
typically taint interpersonal relationships in cultures founded on domination:
coercion, inequity, and injustice. A rejection of orthodoxy, a religious
skepticism, and a willingness to embrace doubt - these are the kinds of
personal attributes that it would not be at all be surprising to find
in individuals striving for this type of 'purity'.
Autonomy and Community
Although 'individual sovereignty' was the guiding precept for the first
proponents of free love, these individuals typically went out of their way
to form voluntary communities in order to 'test individual sovereignty in
a practical setting.' The intention, as Josiah Warren stated it in the 1830s,
was that these communities be ones in which 'every man's hand acts with
instead of 'against' every man, and human interests are harmonized'.
The principle of harmony was deliberately fashioned to 'work in concord with
the sovereignty of the individual,' according to Spurlock. The practical application
of both principles resulted in situations in which 'nothing hindered an individual
from working with others on projects of common concern, but nothing coerced anyone
to do so.'
Like the New Harmony community established earlier, Modern Times,
a community near New York City, attracted radicals who sought a form of
community that valued individual sovereignty. Members were downright suspicious -
and rightfully so - of the prevailing institutions of the time.
Individual sovereignty, which repudiated the authority of both state
and church, strongly implied that all social institutions were null and
void. Matters of taste, right and wrong, sanity and insanity were the
business of the individual, according to Josiah Warren, provided the
individual made decisions at his or her own cost.
And yet, even in statements like the following, in which the intent is
to stress individual sovereignty, interdependence
and genuine intimacy is also celebrated:
It is in combination or close connection only,
that compromise and conformity are required. Peace, harmony, ease, security,
happiness, will be found only in
individuality. (Warren)
We would have preferred the word 'autonomy' to 'individuality'. For
the latter term, insofar as it implies a distinction between the 'individual'
and 'society', promotes precisely the kind of confusion that undercuts
the goals that Warren and like-minded persons sought to achieve - the
reconciliation of 'individual sovereignty' and socially cohesive
'community'. As Andrews pointed out in 1851, 'individual sovereignty'
does not necessarily entail 'the disruption of relationships'; quite the
contrary, it promotes 'the creation of distinct independent personalities
between whom relation can exist.' It is almost as if genuine individual
sovereignty paradoxically requires group solidarity, and vice versa.
Thus, by the end of the 1840s, not only could 'the fervors of reformers
like Andrews find expression in abolitionism, associationism, feminism,
and other groups,' the 'individualist ideals seemingly harmonized with the demands
of organization in the struggle to free the slave, empower the female,
and develop human perfection.'
And so, likewise, is the sovereignty of the individual reconciled
with the joining together of individuals in certain forms of marriage,
according to proponents of free love. As Mary and Thomas Nichols put it in their
mid-19th century manuscript,Marriage, such a couple is ideally comprised
of individuals who are ...
each independent of the other, [yet] drawn together soley by the charm of mutual
attraction, coming from a mutual fitness and adaptation to the spiritual and
material loves, or passional desires of each other.
In the years from 1853 to 1860, free love became the ultimate expression,
according to Spurlock, of middle-class radicalism. With this came a 'repudiation
of any relations between man and woman that violated the individual sovereignty of
either.' Although Andrews and the Nicholses remained married after their conversion to free love, Spurlock reports, they 'redefined their relationship, asserting that they remained faithful out of love rather than coercion.' For them, although the sovereignty of the individual might
be 'the necessary first step', according to Thomas Nichols, 'the mistake is in thinking it
the last.'
By 1854 individuality indeed began to recede as a personal concern of the Nicholses,
and their interest in 'collective harmony' became prominent. But the tragedy for this particular couple is that the stress they experienced as a result of trying to reconcile these two
demands in a society that saw them as irreconcilable opposites ultimately became intolerable for Mary - and eventually this led both of them to attempt to escape by turning to organized religion and more or less conventional lives.
Others, like Mary Grove, fared better. Like Mary Nichols, she was concerned about the limits placed upon women who sought to realize their individuality, and saw the necessity for individuals to find some way of 'stepping beyond that individuality'. But, unlike Nichols, the critique of society on which her views were founded was more profound, and realistic. In 1842 she is reported to have said, 'There is no doubt in my mind that society as it is, is radically and fundamentally wrong'. Its reconstruction, according to Mary Grove, could only begin where falsehood in the relations between men and women ended - and this would require a complete overhaul of the institution of marriage.
Whatever happened to free love as a movement? In the years after the American civil
war,
As marriage took on the attributes of sexual respectablity and as nationalism
replaced the republicanism of the prewar years, advocates of individual
sovereignty became more marginal to American society. By the middle of the 1870s,
free love radicals had lost their connections with many of the more moderate
reformers and found themselves faced with a middle class committed to
ending discussion of marriage reform and sexual liberty. ... As contrary
opinions became marginal to the mainstram of middle-class belief following
the war, free love could not longer appeal as a logical extension of what
the middle class claimed to believe but only as a dangerous attack upon
the most prized middle-class values.
Individual sovereignty, Spurlock concludes, increasingly became more specifically
the program of those who were distinctly not in the mainstream of society. In addition, there were other factors that contributed to the marginalization of free love:
- The movement began to diverge from the women's movement. Although the most
radical visions of the feminists frequently found support from free lovers,
the converse was not always the case;
- More liberal divorce laws were established, resulting in the fact that
divorces doubled every twenty years during the period between 1860 and 1900.
- Free love began to distance itself from the day-to-day concerns of America's
middle class;
- As sexual pleasure was more openly endorsed, personal enjoyment in marriage
was sanctioned - alleviating the need to find pleasure in extra-marital unions;
- The separation of sex from procreation 'gave more protection to the health
of married women, thereby undermining another of free loves's traditional attacks
on marriage'; and, finally
- Free lovers faced a middle class that was increasingly committed to 'large-scale
organization, nationalism, and sexual respectability and INDIFFERENT TO FEARS
OF ARTIFICIAL RELATSIONHIPS' [emphasis ours].
By 1890, leadership of the movement passed almost exclusively to anarchist circles
in Massachusetts and the West. Although Spurlock does not mention it, this is
precisely the group - as we have argued elsewhere on this web site - that most
clearly understands that individual autonomy and social cohension need not necessarily be
considered mutually exclusive options!
One of the anarchists who espoused free love at that time - James Clay, a
'student of reform and a believer in association' - assumed a typically anarchist
position, as the following passage from Spurlock's book demonstrates:
He came to believe that government based upon force was evil. Only by
life in [free] association, in which wealth was roughly equal and each
possessed his own land, could harmony be created. Whether or not he was
inspired by Warren, his thinking was in many respects identical to Warren's.
'Absolute, individual, perpetual freedom from any external statute law,'
wrote Clay in 1856, 'is my unalienable right, more sacred to me than my
material life'.
More than just an extension of his anarchist beliefs, free love for James
Clay was the basic reform that would end inequality in wealth because charity
would be extended to all. 'Freedom in love is to result in the universality
of love, and a community of love, which is to be followed by a community
of property, which is to be founded in truth, on a community of interest in
each other's life and happiness.' Like many free lovers, he believed that
all relations between men and women could be purified by freedom from the
compulsion to marry. (166)
Only when love is enjoyed in freedom, and extended in a more or less
non-exclusionary or 'universal' fashion, is it - in the terminology used
by both the free lovers and, more recently, by Gidden - 'pure', or 'true'.
Although free love, as a social movement, came to an end in the late 1800s,
it would be a mistake to think that the concepts on which the movement
was founded have exhausted their usefulness. They have, in fact, not yet
come to full fruition and continue to possess untapped wealth, even as we enter
a new millenium.
In free-lover Josiah Warren's concept of the need for a 'dis-integration' of non-voluntary
relationship, for instance, we can see a precursor to the contemporary notion of
'deconstruction' - the difference being that while deconstruction is characteristically applied merely to language, it was the actual breakdown of coercive institutions themselves that Warren sought!
Another example is Clay's suggestion that the experience of free love could 'teach purity'
in relationships - a belief that prefigures Giddens' argument, as we've described
it above, that genuine intimacy teaches us the skills that participatory democracy
requires.
Yet another instance of the visionary acumen of the 'free lovers' is to be found in
the manner in which Marx Edgeworth Lazarus, who reputedly '[sought] purity in its most cosmic form', anticipates late 20th century radical movements like 'social ecology'
and 'deep ecology'. It was Lazarus who, in 1852, wrote:
Health is something more than a dietetic code of rules for private use;
it is the entire harmony of man with his planet and his universe; not a
scheme of individual evasion, to dodge the common evil, but a theory of
integral or social redemption.
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